Advertising is a key revenue generator for many enterprises both in offline media (television (TV), newspaper) as well as online (search/contextual, ad-supported media content services, mobile) whereby the latter already represents $79 billion in the US alone, soon to surpass all TV advertising. However, the vast majority of untapped “advertisement inventory” for advertising resides with voice communications themselves. Voice communication is the most native, natural and effective form of human-to-human communication, and with dramatic improvements in speech recognition (Speech To Text, or STT) and speech synthesis (Text To Speech, or TTS) technology over the past years, so too is the natural progression for human-to-machine communication becoming native and replacing the habit for tapping and swiping on smartphone screens, accelerated by voice-first platform devices such as Amazon Alexa® (Alexa® is a registered trademark of Amazon Technologies, Inc. of Seattle, Wash.), Google Home (Google Home is an unregistered tradename of Alphabet, Inc. of Mountain View, Calif.), Samsung Bixby® (Bixby® is a registered trademark of Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. of Suwan, Gyeonggi-do province of South Korea), and similar devices.
Such voice communications may be processed by personal computers (PCs), laptops, mobile phones, voice-interface platform devices (Amazon Alexa®, Google Home, and so forth) and other end-user devices that allow user-specific communications. For that matter, even some point-of-sale (POS) devices allow interactive, voice-activated communication between a user and an automated response system, and may also allow for advertising/sponsor messaging.
In general, digital audio ads today replicate radio advertising in that they are 30 second-long pre-recorded audio messages without any engagement ability. Digital audio advertisement is the choice of top-tier brands who strive for brand image enhancement. It is also a great tool for small and medium businesses who want to reach a greater audience but have a limited budget.